Kid Sells Kidney to Buy iPad, Regrets It

By Bryan Chaffin

Jun 3rd, 2011 4:15 PM EDT

In April, a 17 year old boy sold one of his kidneys to an online broker in order to buy an iPad 2, and is not surprisingly beginning to regret it. ShanghaiDailyreported that the young Chinese boy, with the surname of Zheng, arranged the sale of his kidney to an online broker , who offered him 20,000 Yuan (approximately US$3,086) for the organ.

“I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it,” said the boy surnamed Zheng in Huaishan City. “A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan.”

The BBC added that it was the boy who contacted the broker after seeing an online ad offering money for organs. He traveled to the city of Chenzhou to No. 198 Hospital, where he was eventually paid 22,000 Yuan ($3,392) once his kidney was removed by the doctors.

Of course, that hospital isn’t qualified to perform organ transplants, according to ShanghaiDaily. The hospital itself claimed it didn’t know the surgery was taking place because the entire department that had conducted the surgery had been contracted out to a businessman from Fujian.

All of that came to light after the boy’s mother saw the scar from the operation, realized what he had been up to, and contacted the police. Said police were stymied, however by the diabolical broker’s fiendishly clever plan of turning the cell phone he was using to conduct the transaction off after the deal was done — they couldn’t find him because of this.

But it’s all good! The boy bought himself an iPad 2 and an unspecified laptop with his cash. Now that his health is failing post-organ removal, he can maybe use them to look up symptoms on WebMD.